Product Code Database
The Lawless (also released as The Dividing Line) is a 1950 American film directed by Joseph Losey and featuring Macdonald Carey, Gail Russell and Johnny Sands..Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 156: FilmographyHirsch, 1980 p. 232: Filmography
The plot concerns a crusading newspaper editor in California who becomes concerned about the plight of fruit pickers, mostly immigrants from Mexico.
Lopo visits his friend Sunny Garcia, whose family publishes a Spanish-language paper called La Luz. At a dance, Sunny is introduced to Larry Wilder, editor of The Union, who once was a big-city newspaper reporter. A racially heated fight breaks out at the dance. Paul accidentally strikes Peters, a policeman, and Joe is also arrested. A reporter who works for Larry depicts the incident to a Stockton paper as a full-scale race riot. Reporter Jan Dawson arrives to pursue the story.
Peters roughs up Paul in the back seat of the police car. His partner tries to intervene but crashes the car and dies. Paul flees, and a manhunt begins. It intensifies when teenage farm girl Mildred, startled at seeing Paul, falls and is knocked unconscious, after which she blames Paul for what happened.
Larry tries to defend Paul in a newspaper article, inciting more anger. Lopo is attacked and a lynch mob for Paul is organized. The newspaper office is destroyed. Larry considers leaving town permanently, but he is in love with Sunny, so they decide to merge their newspapers and continue to fight for what is right.
It was a subject I felt very passionately about but I had big trouble because Pine and Thomas were a combination that made ‘B’ pictures for Paramount, and they were monsters, absolute monsters. And they interfered in the worst possible way at all points and I would never have been able to make that picture in a million years if I hadn’t had the guts and if Dan Mainwaring hadn’t had the guts that he had. He really risked his career to protect me.Losey p 91Losey studied the film Fury as well as footage from the 1949 Peekskill riots.Caute p 89
The film was known at one stage as Outrage. Gail Russell had been on suspension by Paramount but was freed to make the film.'Outrage Deal Ends Russell Suspension; Brian Roper Signed' Schallert, Edwin. Los Angeles Times 15 Oct 1949: 11.
The film was an attempt by Pine-Thomas Productions to make a more "significant" kind of film. Shooting began in October and took 18 days.
Losey found it difficult working with Russell, an Alcoholism. Although Paramount forbade her from drinking, Losey gave her alcohol so that she could remember her lines. Losey loved working with cameraman Roy Hunt.
Losey said the producer forced a music score on the film that "made it cheaper and more melodramatic and it slowed its tempo" and he was fired. He also said: "Mainwaring’s script was a very good one but it was corrupted by the producers. I mean all that business of the rape of the girl and the police car going up in flames were stuck in by them, and | didn’t like shooting them and the picture would have been much better without them. But it was quite a successful picture in spite of everything, and it does say what I wanted to say."Losey p 92
The staff at Variety magazine also gave the film a positive review. They wrote, "Racial tolerance gets a working over in The Lawless, but the producers don’t soapbox the message, using it, instead, as a peg on which to produce a hard-hitting drama, equipped with action and fast pace ... Performances all stack up as topnotch, with several being standout."
According to film historian Foster Hirsch, The Lawless garnered “generally good reviews” in America, but was “greeted with wild enthusiasm” in France. Reviewers at Cahiers du Cinéma offered fulsome praise: Marc Bernard wrote “It is the most beautiful of films…I breathe easier after each viewing.” Pierre Rissient declared The Lawless “the greatest western and even the only western ever made.”Hirsch, 1980 p. 39: Cahiers No. 111 p. 33, p. 27Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 6: See here for more from Pierre Rissient
However The Lawless was a box office disappointment and not as profitable as other Pine-Thomas films. Pine felt it might have been more successful if it had a bigger star or if released a year earlier, when he said much of the public “was actually going to see message films.” He and Thomas insisted they were glad they made the film because it was the first time they produced “a real critics’ picture” and it "proved we're guys whose only interest isn't making money."
|
|
